“Thought like that showed me the needless ambiguity of words like space-time. The average person heard a word like that and figured he'd never understand it. But it was so simple. Every place you ever saw was linked to a specific time ... the school you visited twenty years after you graduated, the football field you played on, the track you ran -- none of them was the same. If they were, you would collide with the generations that had run on them before and after you. The lover you kissed was not the same person he or she was sixty seconds before. In that minute, a million skin cells had died and been replaced by new ones. The smallest slices of space-time separated thought from action Life from death.”

“Sooner or later. It had better be sooner. Later is like the horizon; it recedes as you approach.”

“The temptation to second-guess is strong. But I must remember one thing. Life is simple.You are healthy or you are sick. You are faithful to your wife or you aren't. You are alive or you are dead. I am alive.”

“I listened in amazement. You saw a face on an American street, or in an office, and you had no idea that a tragic epic lay behind it.”

“You are told from the moment you enter school that time is constant. It never changes. It is one of those set things in life that you can always rely on... much like death and taxes. There will always be sixty seconds in a minute. There will always be sixty minutes in an hour. And there will always be twenty-four hours in a day. Time was not fluctuating. It moved on at the same, constant pace at every moment in your life. And that was the biggest load of crap that I'd ever been taught in school.”

“Her touch was as knowing and confident as her eyes, and as she focused all her attention upon me, I remembered that there is nothing so thrilling as a woman of words when she decides that the time for words is past.”

“He always reminded us that every atom in our bodies was once part of a distant star that had exploded. He talked about how evolution moves from simplicity toward complexity, and how human intelligence is the highest known expression of evolution. I remember him telling me that a frog's brain is much more complex than a star. He saw human consciousness as the first neuron of the universe coming to life and awareness. A spark in the darkness, waiting to spread to fire.”